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Valve Tested, Scrapped Competitive Multiplayer for Portal 2

Described as speedball meets Portal, mode will not make it to final product.

Co-op play isn't the only surprise Valve had up its sleeve for Portal 2. The developer designed a competitive multiplayer for the upcoming teleportation puzzler, but scrapped it after testing revealed gameplay quickly devloved into chaos.

In an interview with 1Up, Valve writer Erik Wolpaw said the competitive multiplayer mode in Portal 2 tasked two teams with moving a ball from one end of a space to the other using portals. Defending teams used portals of their own to redirect and block opposing players.

"We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running -- the best way to describe it is sort of speedball meets Portal," Wolpaw told 1Up. "You know, a sports analog. And it quickly became apparent that while it's fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path."

The competitive multiplayer was a "hot mess," Wolpaw said, and the decision was made to drop it completely from the game.

Portal 2 is being developed for PC, Mac, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. The game is set to ship on February 9.

Sharkey says: No worries. If Valve's history teaches us anything, it's that the developer's rabid fanbase is able to make some amazing competitive multiplayer games using Valve code. I suspect we'll have an innovative multiplayer from Portal 2 code before long.